George Steiner - Views

Views

George Steiner is regarded as a polymath and often credited with recasting the role of the critic by exploring art and thought unbounded by national frontiers or academic disciplines. He advocates generalisation over specialisation, and insists that the notion of being literate must encompass knowledge of both arts and sciences. Steiner, who is Jewish, rejects Jewish nationalism and is a critic of Israel.

Central to Steiner's thinking, he has stated, "is my astonishment, naïve as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to love, to build, to forgive, and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate."

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Famous quotes containing the word views:

    Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. Men have various employments and pursuits which engage their attention, and give a character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one, and having their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom extend their views beyond the triumph of the hour.
    Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)

    The word “conservative” is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.
    Norman Tebbit (b. 1931)

    Views of women, on one side, as inwardly directed toward home and family and notions of men, on the other, as outwardly striving toward fame and fortune have resounded throughout literature and in the texts of history, biology, and psychology until they seem uncontestable. Such dichotomous views defy the complexities of individuals and stifle the potential for people to reveal different dimensions of themselves in various settings.
    Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)